Wisdom

One of my favorite songs as an adult is “One of These Days” by Neil Young. The lyrics speak to me so strongly. One of these days I’m gonna sit down and write a long letter

My friend Seth Godin introduced me to Ngram that tracks words used in books over the last 200 years. Here’s what a million authors and a billion readers think. He then wrote a blog post about what’s trending: smart, generous, or kind. Kindness wins.

This poem was offered to me by my friend and MEA alum Matt Clark for my birthday. Given the name of the poem and its message, I asked him if I could share with you.

Crisis and opportunity are two sides of the same coin. This past year, a series of crises have predominated. Yet, all kinds of trends - that were already gathering steam - have accelerated due to the pandemic. Here are five that I’m particularly intrigued by:

“Who needs wisdom when we have such exquisite algorithms?” A young data scientist asked me this question when I was at Airbnb. I could tell he was half-serious, so I pulled out a pen and paper and drew this pyramid (if you know me well enough, you know I have “pyramid-envy”).

Our lives are buckling with the stress of undue complexity. So are our organizations. For that matter, so is society. Truth be told, we face all kinds of gnarly problems that don’t seem simple to solve. It’s during these complex times when we need to get back to “first principles,” otherwise known as a basic proposition or assumption that cannot be deduced from any other proposition or assumption.

Richard Rohr is an unconventional modern Christian mystic who has been influenced by Buddhism and Hinduism, Gandhi, Carl Jung, Spiral Dynamics, and Integral Theory. He’s written and spoken about the ancient personality typing tool, the Enneagram, and he has a following that may be more full of non-Christians than Christians.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a LinkedIn article on “The Advice I Wish I’d Been Given at 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50.” Having just turned 60, and being an Abraham Maslow devotee, I wanted to organize my thinking on this subject around the hierarchy of needs for each decade of our lives.

As I hit the big 6-0 tomorrow, I’ve tried reconnecting with Ian Brown’s “Sixty: A Diary of My Sixty First Year,” but I find his kvetching to be insufferable, so I turn to Henry Miller which seems apt since I was supposed to be at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur this weekend which was Henry Miller’s spiritual home.

Joseph Campbell’s teaching opened me up to the value of myth as a means of understanding basic truths and sacred realities. Michael Meade may be the most revered mythologist on the planet today, and his “Living Myth” is one of my top three “listen down by the beach” podcasts that I enjoy.